Macworld09: Live blogging the Apple keynote

Well, now that we know Steve Jobs is doing OK, maybe we can all just focus on the Macworld keynote this morning delivered by senior vice president Phil Schiller.

People are still a little low on expectations without Mr. Jobs doing the hyping, but who knows, maybe Apple will pull out all the stops just to show us that it can bring the heat without Steve as ring leader. We’ll see.

Chronicle

Missing but not forgotten

We took a look at some of the expectations for the keynote here. Another rumor not mentioned is the potential for iPhone tethering, allowing you to use your iPhone 3G as a modem for your laptop. Reports are popping up that this will finally get the go ahead.

Anyway, stay tuned here. We get going at 9 a.m. and we’ll be delivering the news as it happens.

8:53 a.m. Just a few minutes away. Listened to some Killers music on the way in. Crowd is still thick with people even without Jobs planning to talk. Might we still see the genius for a little cameo?/p>

9:07 a.m. He said the stores are generating huge excitement for Apple — 3.4 million visitors a week. “That’s a hundred Macworlds a week.”

9:08 a.m. First announcement: a new version of iLIfe 09.

9:10 a.m. iPhoto now has a feature called Faces so you can organize your photos by people’s faces. Just identify a person and the face detection software IDs people across your entire library.

9:13 a.m. iPhoto also can organize by Places. For geotagged pictures they get organized on a map for you. For older pictures you can identify where they were taken and then organize them on a Google map.

9:17 a.m. iPhoto also has support for easy uploading to Facebook and Flickr accounts. You can send pictures to Facebook with one button. If a friend tags a picture in Facebook, it syncs back to your iPhoto library.

9:19 a.m. You can add themes to your slideshows in iPhoto. Some of this stuff looks amazing, with cool animation between pictures. You can sync the slide show to your iPhone. Very cool.

9:20 a.m. Now a demo of iPhoto. Very easy to identify a person with Faces and then help the software confirm other pictures of that person. The more you help it, the smarter it gets. With Places, you can easily see where you took geo-tagged pictures. For older pictures, you can add locations to pictures just by entering the place name. If you take a bunch of pictures in one day, geotags light up on a map and you can see individual pictures for each location. You can view pictures by locations on a list to also catch up with pictures.

9:28 a.m. Brand new version of iMovie. Last year was new for iMovie and it was much simpler but it left out some features. Now it has more precision for editing, including advanced drag and drop, dynamic themes, animated travel maps and automatic video stabilization.

9:32 a.m. Randy Ubillos, chief architect for video, runs us through a demo. Easier to add audio over video. You can more easily edit action shots and manipulate the audio better to sync up with the videos. With video stabilization iMovie scans for all the motion and then smooths out the excess jumpiness. It’s pretty cool. You can speed up or slow down video easily and also add effects including cartoon or aged-film filters. For animated maps, you can create that fun Indiana Jones effect of traveling around the world. There are also new transitions and themes, including a new scrapbook theme that organizes your video into a book-like experience.

9:42 a.m. One more iLife update: GarageBand09. The big thing is Learn to Play, which teaches people to play guitar or a keyboard. You get to go through interactive video lessons that allow you to learn chords and notes and control the pace of the teaching. GarageBand comes with nine basic lessons for both piano and guitar. But GarageBand also includes artists such Steve Fogarty or Sting teaching you one of their songs. Norah Jones is one of the keyboard teachers as well. There is a store in GarageBand where you can buy the artist lessons, which include snippets from the artists about the songs they’re teaching. Now a demo video of Fogarty. iLIfe ships in late January, free on new Macs and $79 for an upgrade.

9:50 a.m. New updates for iWork. Keynote now has something called magic move which does some nice animation between slides. You can also do object transitions which allow you to zoom and move between objects. Also there is text transitions, which allow you to jazz up text. Chart animations are new too so you can make those graphs and charts all sexy like. And you also have new themes that unify your slides. And one more feature: a new keynote remote for your iPod Touch or iPhone, which can talk to your Mac through Wifi. Your iPhone screen becomes a preview pane and also a controller, so you can flick to the next slide.

9:56 a.m. Now updates to Pages. Can go into full screen view and focus on what you’re doing. You also can make outlines for your document. There is also mail merge with Numbers, MathType & Endnotes and new templates for documents, fliers and correspondence.

9:59 a.m. Now more on Numbers, the spread sheet program. You can organize better by table categories, you’ve got more functions, new chart options with more advanced reporting features and you can also link charts to pages, so any chart you’ve put into a document gets automatically updated when you change it. There are also new templates for spread sheets. iWork ships today for $49 for new Mac owners or $99 for a family pack. There is also a Mac Box set available in late January for $169 that includes the Mac OS X operating system along with iWork and iLife.

10:04 a.m. There is also now iWork.com, an online way to share your work. You can easily upload documents online and you can share them with other people. People can add comments and notes online. And then you can download a copy in multiple formats. You can share it with someone and they get a chance to view your document online through their browser. It can be read as a PDF or as a Microsoft Word file. Customers can sign up free for the beta. Later you’ll have to pay. It’s a good way to share big documents and also a way to store stuff in the cloud for retrieval anywhere. Ships today and is accessible through iWork.

10:10 a.m. Next up: the 17-inch MacBook Pro. MacBooks have gone with the unibody enclosure for its body and now the 17-inch gets the same treatment. It’s .98 inch thick and 6.6 pounds, the thinnest and lightest 17-inch out there. It also has a 1920 x 1200 pixel resolution, a 700:1 contrast ratio and a $50 anti glare option. It has a new glass track pad with multi-touch support. It can go up to a 2.93 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, has discrete and integrated graphics from Nvidia, up to 8GB of RAM and 320GB hard drive. And it has the longest battery life ever. They made the battery bigger to give it more life but they made it embedded so it’s 40 percent larger and can get 8 hours on a single charge. They’ve made custom shaped cells to take advantage of the size limitations. They used advanced chemistry and better monitoring to extend the life of the batteries, to get up to 1,000 recharges, about three times the industry average. Ships in late January starting at $2,799.

10:24 a.m. One last thing … iTunes has sold more than 6 billion songs in six years. It’s the world’s largest library, with 10 million songs. There are 75 million accounts. First new thing is price. Starting in April, three pricing tiers: 69 cents, 99 cents and $1.29. Also, there is more digital rights management-free music available. We’re talking 8 million songs and by the end of the quarter, the last 2 million will go DRM free. You can go through your library and upgrade it to DRM free. Also, for the iPhone iTunes Music Store, you can now download over 3G, not just Wi-Fi. It’s the same selection and price and quality over the cell network. You don’t have to be within Wi-Fi range to get music. That starts today. And now, we have 15-time Grammy award winner Tony Bennett closing out the show with “The best is yet to come.”

10:33 a.m. Tony finishes up the first song and now we’re into, you guessed it: “I left my heart in San Francisco.”

10:37 a.m. “That’s our show,” said Schiller. No sign of Jobs. Time to check out the 17-inch MacBook Pro.